Some notes on "The Waste Land" which I am teaching tomorrow

[I just wrote this to help me think. No pressure to read it. I didn't even proofread it or worry too much about making sense.]

To begin in the middle, at teatime, in the violet hour:

There are four characters in this episode: the typist; her lover, the young man carbuncular; Tiresias the narrator, blind seer, hermaphrodite, old man with wrinkled dugs; and iambic pentameter.

Eliot says in his notes that Tiresias is "the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest," that "the two sexes meet in Tiresias," and that "what Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem." Eliot's note suggests that what blind Tiresias sees as he goes about his immortality encompasses all of human history, and that, after a while, this history appears uniformly dreary. Like the Cumean Sybil of the epigraph, who, granted immortality without eternal youth, interns her frail body inside a hanging jar, this Tiresias has age without vitality, knowledge without agency, and wisdom without consequence. And like the Sybil, the only sensation his body feels is pain; he "throbs" between two lives, the male and female, but not with pleasure.

The source of Tiresias's wisdom, and also his pain, is an unlucky involvement in the sexual lives of others. As Eliot notes, Ovid's account of Tiresias's blinding begins with the future seer disturbing a pair of giant mating snakes and ends with him attempting to mediate a sexual dispute between Jupiter and Juno; neither was a good idea. In both cases, the consequences of others' sexualities are enacted on Tiresias's own body, first with a change of sex, then with a change back, then with blindness, and then with second sight.

Because he bears the marks of others' sexual passions, the passionless Tiresias resembles the poem's victims of rape, Philomel most notably, though he can speak his hard-won knowledge intelligibly while she, as a nightingale, is reduced to pure lyricism, pure song. It is also arguably in this victimized capacity that Tiresias most resembles the typist whose story he narrates.

A question this episode suggests is whether the typist is doubly violated not only by her lover, the young man carbuncular, to whom she unenthusiastically acquiesces, but also by Tiresias and by extension the poem itself. The typist, opening cans, smoothing her hair, does not know she is being watched, and though the scene is intimate beyond narrative credibility--Tiresias tells us her thoughts--it is not not convincingly interior. We see what she does but not why, and so, in her blankness, we are invited to use her again, in a literary sense, to see her not as a person but as a symbol for modern decay, for hopeless passivity in the face of vulgarity, for the parallel destructions of passion and decorum.

The discomfort of this violation is both soothed and exacerbated by the beauty of the lines themselves. Pound called parts of "The Waste Land" "too penty," and much of the poem's original pentameter was varied and tightened in revision, but this episode is spoken in almost perfect blank verse, unwavering for forty lines. This prosodic allusion to English verse traditions reinforces the contrast between high and low, grand and banal, that structures this section and the poem as a whole, and uses the familiar and venerable English meter to triangulate the relationship between classical and modern.

At the same time, this triangulation makes it more difficult to read Tiresias as the true speaker of the lines, as do the many modern references, and the mind-reading. All of this suggest a uniting consciousness beyond Tiresias, a speaker-poet who is both complicit in and apart from the ambiguous violence of the scene. On the one hand, the poem, like the young man, uses the typist without allowing her agency; its vanity, like his, requires no response. On the other hand, there is tenderness in the attention paid to the details of the typist's evening, in the elevation of them into poetry, and there is sympathy, based on experience, in Tiresias's narration.

In this scene, then, in its strangeness and artificiality, juxtaposed with the intimate and potentially shameful everyday, the poem dramatizes the danger of witness and the difficulty of sympathy. There are no true connections, and yet there is feeling, and yet the scene dissolves without resolution, with a cinematic fade from the typist's gramophone to Ariel's song in "The Tempest," leaving the characters alone to enact the scene again.